Texas Hold'Em

Last night Adam invited me and a couple other people over to his house to try out his new hobby, playing poker, or more specifically, Texas Hold'Em. Texas Hold'Em is a version of poker where you have two cards you keep to yourself and there are five community cards. You use the seven cards to make the best five card hand you can. There are four rounds of betting each hand, unless everyone but the winner folds. First, after you see your two private cards, then after the first three community cards are shown, then after the fourth, and finally after the fifth.

I was a little skeptical about how I'd enjoy it, as I've never liked the idea of gambling, so I was pleasantly surprised. We were playing with bets that were only twenty cents in size, so there was little real risk, but it was just enough to make it kind of fun. I came out of it with just under $3 in winnings, which based on twenty cent bets is something like "seven big bets" as Adam explained, although today that isn't quite adding up - I'll have to ask him again. He said that's very good, as when he and his friend Chris play, they are content with 1.5 big bets per hour. If you do that consistently, which I guess they both do, you can then count on winnings at 1.5 times the big bet per table you play on per hour.

Chris (again, Adam's friend, a male, rather than his wife, a female) has apparently played often, on three tables at once online, for stakes that are high enough that he's made some $27,000 playing poker in the last couple months, effectively more than I make at my job at Microsoft. He's now facing what is apparently a common problem for gamblers - should he just do it as his primary means of making an income, leaving his job as a university professor? If so, his new role in society is to make money by taking it directly from others. At some point, when it becomes interesting for others to watch you play, I guess you become an entertainer, which is more like acting or professional sports, but on the way up, there's little in teh way of socially redeeming aspects to the work.

I'm sure for some, this is no problem. I know I'd have a difficult time with it, although I think I could actually become pretty good at poker if I were to focus on it. One of my early professional positions, I was writing software that was used for an accounting purpose - tracking the bills and payments for the lawyers that were representing insurance companies that were involved in lawsuits with other insurance companies they had insured (called reinsurance) where the "reinsured" company had taken losses from asbestos and environmental pollution claims and wanted reimbursement. That was far away from anything I could consider socially redeeming, and even in my early twenties, it bothered me. Yet, it could perhaps be considered more socially redeeming than being a middle-tier gambler.

But back to the game aspect. In general, my problem with gambling is that I know it's something where the casino takes your money. Poker does seem different, though, as there's an element of calculating odds, deciding when to bet or fold, plus some bluffing and reading other's emotions over their hands. If you are a better player than those you play with, you will win money over time. Adam and Chris have already proved that - Chris started with something like $10, Adam with $100, and they both declared they would quit if they ever lost that starting "seed money." Neither has done that, and Chris is probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of winnings and Adam, who started much more recently after hearing Chris' success, was up about $500 as of last night.

So, would I play it again? You bet!